But since Meadows and Thomas did it all under orders from Jesus (their texts are shot through with Good v Evil), we can only join the editorial board of Compact (see post below) and applaud these servants of the Lord. Satan stole the election, but they fought the good fight and will be granted sainthood by President Waldstein in the Cathophate to come.

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Meanwhile, Justice Thomas has been hospitalized with Lying Low Syndrome.

Ben Burgis:

Compact’s founders seem to believe that the ruling class is imposing social liberalism on an unwilling majority. But the majority of our society is wildly socially liberal by historical and global standards — or even by recent American ones.

According to a recent Pew poll, fewer than 10 percent of Americans think that marijuana should be illegal, for example. Almost three quarters agree with the Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage assailed by [Compact writers]. Two-thirds oppose laws that limit trans rights. As young conservative Nate Hochman recently acknowledged, polling shows that even young Republicans are “more liberal than their older counterparts on everything from diversity to LGBT rights to immigration to climate change.”

Few European countries have been as historically friendly to the kind of laws [Compact‘s editors] might support to defend “familial and religious” communities against “libertine” encroachments as the Republic of Ireland — and within the last decade, abortion and same-sex marriage were both legalized there by popular referendum. And they were playing catch-up. At least until some unforeseen cultural shift dramatically realigns public attitudes, any scenario by which neo-medieval traditionalists succeed in wielding state power to smite gay people who want to get married and women who want to control their own bodies and drag queens who want to read to children at the library is a scenario by which social conservatism is imposed against the will of a large majority of the American populace.

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In the words of Eric Levitz, Compact‘s editors share “the delusion that their own esoteric misgivings about liberalism reflect those of a silent (or latent) majority.”

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Compact calls itself “radical,” and UD‘s heart goes out to it. She knows radical – the smell of it, the sweat of it, the aching sweetness of it. Her radical lover, David Kosofsky (brother of radical Eve), massaged her feet after their long march together on the Pentagon and it all went directly from UD‘s feet to her head. Started feety, ended heady. She was swept up in the edgy epater les bourgeois truth of existence, and her sense of excitement, clarity, and superiority was … she could taste it, man. UD remembers attending a John Cage concert around thirty years ago at Harvard – it was put on by a group of undergraduates – and, you know, some affectless madwoman drags herself forward onstage and begins chewing her violin – and, bored out of her gourd, UD began glancing around, and there entwined on the floor behind her were two students involved in the staging of the show, and the way they looked at each other! The certainty, the arrogance, the excitement! Tell me about it, babes, thought UD, smiling at them. Tell me about it.

Right rads got the same thing going, only they’re clenching in the back row of a heretic getting burned at the stake. As I say, my heart goes out to them.

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Update: Thanks go to my friend Rita for telling me about the phrase RAD TRADS — “young Catholics who prefer traditional liturgy, including the Latin Mass, and subscribe to more conservative political beliefs and religious practices.” UD was reaching for this when she wrote “Right rads,” but Rad trads is double-plus-good! Rad trads are like the Rad rois Lucien Goldman recalls encountering when he first arrived in France in 1934:

There was a very strong royalist movement among the students and suddenly a group appeared which was equally in defense of royalism, but which demanded a real Merovingian king!

Seems reasonable to ol’ UD, and in making this law for at least one of its regions, India is acting in accord with a lot of other countries.

Karnataka’s high court, that is, has ruled that the hijab is not a required religious garment. Those who want a different outcome can appeal the ruling to the supreme court, though I doubt a higher court will reverse it.

The fear … is that the BJP is trying again to impose its Hindu majority agenda on the minorities by depriving them of their right to religion and their freedom of choice.

That’s a very reasonable fear; yet given the routine nature, around the globe, of restrictions on school uniforms, I’m not sure it pertains in this case. In the matter of India, UD is more scandalized by this:

[A recent] government introduced Vedic astrology as a subject in college curricula, despite opposition from several leading scientists.

Some of it, anyway. She was one of hundreds of people who increased the Ridgeland Library’s funds after the town’s homophobe mayor refused funding when he found out that libraries have books and all.

… old televangelist.

[The Freedom from Religion Foundation contacted] Cabell County Schools administrators in 2017 and 2019 regarding religious activities taking place in schools. … “Despite FFRF’s prior warnings, … adults have continued to promote religion to Cabell County students during the school day, including through religious assemblies,” the lawsuit states.

Three strikes you’re sued, I guess. And it’s about time. No fan of promiscuous litigation, UD nonetheless has long argued on these pages that hopeless recidivists – and fanatics just can’t help it – can only be controlled, in many cases, via the legal system.

Horny haredim, for instance, are always going to stand up on airplanes and demand seating that does not torment them through the proximity of female flesh; and the only way to control this behavior has been to throw them off the airplane when they do their thing.

I mean, the only way for an airline to avoid endless $500,000 a pop successful lawsuits brought by harlots publicly forced to change their seats is to throw the haredim off the plane. Or threaten to do so. Which now routinely happens.

Similarly, it’s quite clear from the incorrigible behavior of Huntington High School’s principal that he perceives his teenage charges as lambs of Christ whether they like it or not, and no heathen “foundation” is going to stand in the way of his herding and revivaling them. Only the principled removal of the principal, plus painful financial penalties against the school district, will begin to perform the miracle of making the blind see in West Virginia.

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‘Course ol’ UD is also waiting for the part where it turns out the principal’s receiving kickbacks from Nik, the mentally challenged revivalist in question, per teenage hellion butts the principal puts in seats. Or whatever. There’s got to be some form of money corruption at play here; it wouldn’t be Jim Bakker-style revivalism without it. Let’s wait and see.

Google News is full of the Good News this morning. It’s all over the place!

Try it in your community — Just take one public school, stage a religious revival meeting, and lock students out of their classrooms so they have no choice but to attend. It’s that simple.

Once her giggling fit subsided, UD , a Jew, gave the matter some serious thought…

“Maroon me on a desert island with nothing to read but First Things.“

Such as this 2015 event at the University of Chicago, which wee UD only just discovered.

Let me frame my remarks by recalling this comment from Christopher Hitchens:

When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine’s Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression.

One of the heroes of free expression I’ve found through writing this blog is Geoffrey Stone, a law professor at the U of C. I’ve had two occasions to feature him, one when he defended Laura Kipnis against silly Northwestern, and another when he shared an email exchange he had with American Nazi Richard Spencer. Stone is a wise calm rational defender of pretty much unfettered free expression, and he introduced the guest speaker on my cosmic convergence youtube, which – I dunno – already the combination of Stone and the U of C – a school which welcomed wee UD generously and lovingly for her graduate education – had UD warm and runny…

This is from Stone’s introductory remarks:

We the people acting individually … get to decide what we think when we think it. We do not allow a government or a university or a corporation or a religion to make those choices for us. That’s the essence of what it means to be free.

Stone goes on to introduce the U of C undergraduate who unwittingly set in motion a big event at the school. Eve Zuckerman, president of the school’s French club, wanted to invite heroic free speech advocate Zineb El Rhazoui to speak to the club. But getting a person living under five thousand fatwas to the United States ain’t exactly a matter of paying for a flight from Paris. Zuckerman ended up needing serious help (help which was happily provided) from lots of French and American government and security officials, some of whom ended up attending El Rhazoui’s talk. So that’s impressive and heartening.

Yet more impressive was the tough, articulate (in her fourth language), non-negotiable defense of free speech and free thought launched by El Rhazoui, who has been particularly visible in the French media lately because of the notorious “dolls without faces” documentary which features the apparently Muslim-radicalized French city of Roubaix.

It’s funny how these dolls, on sale at a toy store there, have taken on a powerful symbolic life across France — I guess because they’re a simple, very graphic evocation of the social reality whereby some Muslim children are trained up very early indeed in a sense of their nothingness, their invisibility. Veiling is hardly scandalous, even to a six-year-old, if you’ve always understood yourself to be without even a face.

Anyway, there it all was: The University of Chicago, Stone, El Rhazoui. What a pleasure.

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UPDATE: The president of UD‘s George Washington University might want to watch the Stone/El Rhazoui youtube.

… puts his trust in God.

… Opening day of Allison Fluke-Ekren’s trial, complete with the mug shot heard round the world.

Really spoils the party.

On the same date as World Hijab Day, you can instead celebrate No Hijab Day, when you express solidarity with millions of women and children around the world desperate for freedom and autonomy.

When you give thought (and this Yale student is right to worry that you’re not giving thought) to your freedom not to veil, and, more importantly, to the ongoing withdrawal of that freedom for huge numbers of people in other countries, you are less likely to consider the hijab – and other marks of submission – something to celebrate. It’s something to tolerate, to be sure – but we do not set aside annual holidays to celebrate – and even wear! – that which we tolerate. Freedom is something to celebrate, and No Hijab Day celebrates it.

Free women and men of the secular west most recently had their say after the Council of Europe’s ill-fated attempt to foist a celebrate the hijab advertising campaign on them.

Reminding that women are free to wear the hijab is one thing,” [French] Socialist Senator Laurence Rossignol said, “but saying freedom is in hijab is another. It’s promoting it. Is this the role of the Council of Europe?”

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Gabriel Attal, [French] government spokesman, said after a cabinet meeting on Wednesday that the campaign defied common sense “because one shouldn’t confuse religious freedom with the de facto promotion of a religious symbol”. Such an “identitarian” approach was “contrary to the freedom of conscience that France supports in all European and international forums”, Attal said.

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Don’t celebrate women who force their eight year old daughters under hijabs. When you wear one, you’re saying that this is okay. Celebrate No Hijab Day.

Jesus told Ridgeland, Mississippi Mayor Gene McGee to kick all the queer books out of the town’s library.

Like his political mentor, Kim Jong-Un (plus this guy), Mayor Gene McGee thinks “governance” means everyone acts in strict conformity with Gene McGee’s personal whims. He is withholding taxpayer funds marked for the library until every book Jesus tells Mayor McGee to burn is burned.

While the city’s aldermen … approved the funds, … the mayor alone … is withholding [them]. “I asked the mayor specifically on the phone call if this had been decided by the board of aldermen. And he told me no, but (that) he could have them make that decision,” [the director of the county’s library system] said.

I CAN HAVE THEM MAKE THAT DECISION.

ONWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS.

Jesus told Mayor Gene McGee to Run away! Run away! when the library board held a meeting to discuss the issue; and, with growing national attention directed to McGee and his town, McGee has also received a Jesus-directive not to respond to press inquiries.

One grateful townsperson does speak to the press.

… AND one of the highest-profile, most powerful, orthodox Jews New York has ever produced, we do well to revisit Jeffrey Goldberg’s ruminations on consistently high rates of various forms of criminality among this extremely pious group (Silver’s son-in-law, a Ponzi schemer, not long ago was released from prison). Some of his thoughts also appear in this Google book excerpt. (Here are my Sheldon Silver posts.)

He theorizes that “insularity plus a hyper-legalistic approach to life” creates illegal conduct.

Can observing the ritual so fastidiously blind someone to the fact that there are a whole other set of laws governing the way we’re supposed to act toward our fellow man? … [Why do significant numbers of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox seem] to have contempt for non-Jews? … [They seem to have] transferred their attitudes from Europe to here, never contemplating for a moment that government here is fundamentally different.

As we settle in for the trial of Malka Leifer, ultraorthodox school principal/child rapist – an event distinguished from SCADS of orthodox and ultraorthodox child/teen sex abuse cases all over the place only in that Leifer is a woman – we need to prepare ourselves for the articles in the American, European, and Israeli press about Okay! Now we’ve REALLY turned a corner with these people! With the eyes of the world following so many lurid high-profile orth. and ultraorth. cases things are REALLY going to change in these notoriously child-sex-abusive sects!

Vey, mes petites. Do a little reading on cults. Abuse rates are obscenely high among the super-strict, closed, sexually hyper-repressed because… I mean, hasn’t this sentence already, even before it finishes itself, answered the question it’s posing? Do I need to specify the precise menu ingredients here?

Okay.

1. Take a completely masculine cult, a cult where men are most of the time alone among themselves and hold total power (via the local rabbi overlord who holds power over the men) over women and children.
2. Blend in a reproductive rather than loving/pleasurable sexual relationship with these men’s wives, causing serious sexual repression problems among the men, whose daily lives, often involving no real work, allow them plenty of time to sit around fantasizing about sex with girls and boys who aren’t brood mares.
3. Check to make sure that both the husbands and wives in this group have been raised sexually repressed and sexually ignorant, and married off insanely early, so that their sexual/emotional maturity level is … elementary school?
4. Put them in a twisted patriarchal world that regards male sexual access to children as unscandalous, or, if scandalous, OUR scandal, which we will hush up rather than stop or report to the authorities. Men will be men. The ways of the lord are strange. It’s probably good for the kids.
5. Make the child victims utterly, unbelievably, innocent and ignorant. They don’t know what’s going on, much less know to report it. If, after years of being raped, they figure out something illegal is going on, they have probably also figured out that if they tell anyone, they and their family will be socially tortured and then thrown out of the cult.
6. Make everyone afraid – their parents, who might have noticed this or that bleeding vagina or anus; their friends, their teachers – make them and everyone in their world afraid. Does this all sound a touch Gothic to you? Are we being melodramatic? ….. Hello? Are you listening? This. Is. A. Cult. It’s no different from any other cult. Virtually all powerful men in all cults have access to/control the bodies of the most vulnerable cultists. Nature of the beast.
7. Make sure that the ideology of hatred/indifference toward, and exploitation of, local, state, and federal authority runs deep. Only the rabbi overlord has any moral/legal legitimacy. Whatever else is out there can fuck itself. (Hot off the press example: Although the authorities seem finally to have caught up with their notoriously criminal leader for his latest offenses – he has already spent two years in jail for his earlier ones – Israel’s ultraorthodox will certainly keep Aryeh Deri as their leader. I mean, who gives a shit that he breaks laws left and right. What laws? Who cares??) Only with this attitude do you guarantee that the rape of children will proceed normally.

Is any of this helping you understand why rates of child sexual abuse in orthodox and ultraorthodox communities are outrageously high? … To the extent that we can begin to measure them, that is, given the absolutely locked shut status of these cults… I mean, they’re not exactly going to cooperate, or disclose, or anything. It’s just child rape, for goodness sake.

And listen. If non-cultic communities cared at all about generations of raped children, they’d solve this.

And the solution isn’t that difficult. They need to take the Voting Blocs Detox Pledge:

I, important politician, pledge to overlook the fact that hundreds of thousands of these people vote as one for me/my party, and I pledge to move against them legally anyway. I pledge to put the interests of raped children above my partisan advantage.